


Aftermath

by turianosauruswrex



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Destroy Ending, Gen, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, Renegade Shepard (Mass Effect), Self-Reflection, always seemed...unfair to me tho that a full renegade shep could just. survive., hey if you don't know what happens to wrex in a full renegade me3: it's bad!, so maybe it seems unfair to her too, you can commit multiple war crimes and come out fine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:46:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27853618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/turianosauruswrex/pseuds/turianosauruswrex
Summary: After all you've done for this victory, Shepard, how can you say you're a hero?
Relationships: Female Shepard/Garrus Vakarian
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	Aftermath

The taste of blood and ash tell you you're alive. Helpless, buried under the wreckage of the Crucible and god knows what else, but alive. When strong hands dig you out you weakly call them the names of the dead, or those to whom you might as well be. Eve. Grunt.  _ Wrex. _

You wake up. The rachni queen writhes and screams as the tank fills with acid, dissonant notes clanging against the glass, eight black eyes locked with your own ice blue, unadulterated hatred meeting immobile indifference. The queen begged for the lives of herself and her children and only when it helped the war was the survival of an entire race ever considered. Once, and only once.  


You wake up. Maybe it's an attempt at having a conscience. Maybe it's rage at what was done here in the name of progress, hypocrite. Or maybe it's just not caring enough to stop him. Mordin wipes the data gathered from Maelon's experiments. The last of the krogan females chokes on her own blood and dies.

You wake up. Wrex looms over you, his low growl more blood-curdling than anything you've ever seen or heard from him on the battlefield.

You wake up. The child flees at the very sight of you, your face barely held together with the last remnants of Cerberus.

You wake up. The salarian dalatrass smiles.

You wake up not all at once but piece by piece, slowly becoming aware of every noise around you. The beeping of a heart rate monitor. The whispering of an oxygen machine. Distant voices all talking over one another in varying degrees of panic. And at your side, breaths you're all too familiar with. 

_ Don't let them fix my scars, Garrus, _ you croak,  _ we still have to match. _

The noise he makes couldn't exactly be called a laugh, but it isn't a sob either. There's something, at least.

An endless onslaught of doctors and nurses-- and, to be honest, whatever painkillers they have you on-- makes thinking next to impossible, save for the few thoughts that manage to work their way through the fog at night in the precious minutes before you fall asleep again. The war is over. The Reapers gone, forever. You can retire at 34, if you want to, live the rest of your days on some beach somewhere, margarita in hand, and no one would blame you. 

Not until they discover what you did to get that victory.

Days and surgeries blend together. Sometimes you wonder if survival was worth it. Half the time it's barely-managed pain, the other half it's coming down off anesthesia, out of your mind until the pain sets in again. Garrus says one time as you woke up you tried to talk to him in sign language. Neither of you know sign language. Another time you blinks awake and he's teasing you about telling him your middle name and acting like it was a state secret. No actual state secrets, he assures you, have been spilled.

You don't deserve him. Least of all for all the work he puts in fending off bloodthirsty reporters and well-meaning well-wishers who nonetheless have no reason to be in your room. One look from the Archangel and the bravest of them can only fumble out the beginnings of an introduction before they slink off. Security does what they can, of course, but in the aftermath of the war everyone's stretched a little thin, even when it comes to guarding the recovery of the biggest damn hero of them all.  _ Hero. _ You don't deserve that, either.

Heroes don't sacrifice entire planets without hesitation. Heroes don't shoot daughters who just watched their mothers commit suicide. Heroes don't stab their friends' entire race in the collective back, promising to free them from a thousand-year-old curse only to sabotage the cure at the drop of a hat. They don't lie about it until the evidence of their crime is laid bare in front of their face. They don't murder the smartest man they know as he tries to redeem himself for his own wrongdoing and they  _ don't _ murder the one who rightfully tries to bring them to justice for an almost certain genocide. You, you are no hero, and you have not been for some time.

Months pass, a year passes in a fog that doesn't extend outside the hospital doors until during yet another conversation with yet another surgeon you realize how tired you are. You want to go home, or at least try to find one amidst the rubble of a galaxy rebuilding itself.

They officially discharge you on November 7th. Garrus again puts himself between you and the media, and while a seven-foot-tall turian makes for a decent shield he is not a perfect one, and you catch a glimpse of a live broadcast of yourself on a screen above. The long, deep red hair you spent so many years growing and tending to, even after you enlisted, is gone, reduced to fuzz that barely covers a new set of scars criss-crossing your scalp. Your eyes, once a terrifying red glow you hoped haunted the Reapers in the dark, are their old icy blue again, pocked with holes where the synthetics shone through. The gashes scoring your face are nothing more than gaping black canyons, barely filled with what tech the hospital could scrape together for  _ Commander Shepard _ . Of course after you wiped out synthetics they would use the best of what remained on the face of the galaxy's hero instead of the body of a lesser soldier who needed it. Your stomach turns more than you thought it would. You look more uncomfortable than you've ever felt in the mobility aid exoskeleton your physical therapist put you in, but what strikes you most are the dark circles under your eyes. They were bad during the war. They're worse now. You carry the weight of billions on your shoulders and somehow, somehow, you think, you have to find a way to atone.

Garrus puts a supportive arm around your waist, whispers in your ear he's rented a shuttle to take you anywhere, anywhere you could possibly want to go, as long as that place isn't the Citadel, they're still working on that, and the only thing you can think of is Vancouver. You didn't even grow up on Earth. You have...maybe one attachment to the city but it's unlikely to last long, should Kaidan ever see you again. But Vancouver you say, so Vancouver it is. You watched it burn last time. Pray it doesn't happen again.

Convalescence offers ample time to think about what you've done. Your daily routine goes something like:  _ four a.m., wake up screaming, five a.m., shuffle around the apartment until your legs can't take any more, six a.m., try and distract yourself with books or vids or anything you can get your hands on, noon, an attempt at lunch. Two p.m., ignore interview requests, three p.m., freeze entirely, four p.m., try to make up for lost sleep, five p.m., fail. _ You can't leave the apartment without being swarmed, so you don't. You can't bear having visitors, so you don't. You can't stop replaying scenarios and wondering what could have been different, so you don't.

Thesis: the Reapers want to wipe out intelligent life. They are concrete evil, they must be eliminated. So you do. You honor Anderson, you shoot the power conduit, you close your eyes and let yourself rest as the Citadel explodes around you. Your fate has been woven with the Reapers since Eden Prime. Some part of you always knew you would die with them. It shouldn't have been you on Virmire. It shouldn't even have been you when the Collectors attacked the  _ Normandy _ . The universe had to hold on to you, save you for something  _ real _ special. Something like destroying what would destroy galaxies.

Antithesis: The Reapers do not  _ want. _ They were programmed for a job that they carried out with brutal efficiency. Just like you. They do not hesitate, they do not think before slaughtering a civilization. You do not hesitate. You slaughtered, and slaughtered, and slaughtered. You claim to think before making choices that lead to the demise of an entire people but you know better. How different from them are you? Would controlling them have made you less human than you already are?

Synthesis: ...Synthesis. Who are you to make that decision? Who are you to make any of the decisions you've made? To determine the rachni are too dangerous to be free? The krogan, too volatile to be allowed to  _ reproduce? _ At least the existence of synthetics doesn't take anything away from the galaxy.  _ Didn't _ . It  _ didn't _ take anything away. But you did, yet again. Who are you?

You're Shepard. Not Commander Shepard, just...Shepard. You are ruthless, she is efficient; you are a monster, she is a savior. She sacrificed so much to win an impossible war. You murdered your friend in cold blood when he found out the  _ atrocity _ you committed against his people, and to the rest of the galaxy he's just another brute, killed in an argument with an Alliance soldier over gambling debts. Wrex deserves better than this. He deserved better than you.

You know, for the longest time, none of your crew even knew your first name? Garrus still doesn't use it and you like it better that way. Let the name your parents gave you die with them on Mindoir. Let Mindoir die, for that matter; you've used it as an excuse for your brutality long enough. You know who else has seen their entire family murdered? About half the Milky Way at this point. You know who hasn't committed multiple war crimes as a result? That same half of the Milky Way. At some point you have to stop blaming what was done to you and take responsibility for what you've done. Commander Shepard can. So why can't you?

Commander Shepard is a hero. She used what wounded her to better herself; she made hard decisions so no one else had to. She let herself feel what she had to feel, mourn when she had to mourn; everything she did was for the sake of the galaxy. Can you say the same? 

The best you can say for yourself is that you...don't die right. Choking to death as you watched your ship explode in a Collector beam or bleeding out on what was the Citadel, death isn't something you're very good at. Maybe it should be. Would it be better if you were? Surely the galaxy would have found another hero, someone who deserved the title. You can name half a dozen on your crew alone. They would have stepped up. They would have filled your shoes to the breaking point and they would have saved so, so many more people in the process.

And who are you to ask that of them?

Shepard. You're Shepard. It's all you've ever been. All you'll ever be.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm unsure about this but I'm also very done looking at this *shrug*
> 
> surprised it took me seven years to write a Mass Effect fic tho


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